Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning/Preface
PREFACE.
To republish a book after a lapse of thirty-six years can only be excused by the fact that it has long been out of print and that it is still asked for. When a new edition was proposed to me. my first intention was to issue the book as it stood, with no more change than the correction of obvious mis takes. But further consideration showed me that a good deal more than this was necessary if it was to be republished at all. Such revision, however, as I have made has been designedly made with a sparing hand, and the book remains in substance and in most details a work not of 1920 but of 1884. Had I written it now, the point of view would not have been quite the same. A large literature on the subjects I dealt with has appeared in the interval, and a fresh examination of the materials would certainly have recommended a different selection of illustrations from that which I made then. It was indeed fortunate that I gave the book the title of Illustrations, because it made no claim to be a coherent history, though it has sometimes been mistaken for one.
The long interval of time which separates the new edition from the original seems to justify some statement as to the manner in which the essays collected in the book came to be written. In 1881 I resigned a post which I held in the department of manuscripts in the British Museum in order to spend two years in study on the Continent. This plan was made feasible by my election to a travelling scholarship on the Hibbert foundation, and I cannot too heartily express my gratitude to the trustees for thus enabling me to begin a course of work which I have carried on ever since. I settled myself then at Leipzig in the autumn of 1881, entered the university, and was promoted doctor of philosophy in the following January. I started my own work by reading John of Salisbury, but soon saw that he could not stand as a beginning. I had become acquainted with the venerable Gotthard Lechler, one of the professors in the theological faculty of the place and superintendent in the reformed church, a man well-known in England for his pioneer studies of Wycliffe. He recommended me to read Hermann Reuter s Geschichte der religiosen Aufklarung im Mittelalter, and I took his advice. It would not indeed be true to say that I learned much from Reuter s exaggerated and often dis torted presentment of facts; but I found his references useful, and in planning the first half of my book I followed pretty closely the scheme of his. But it seemed to me that the field which Reuter surveyed needed an introduction, and in writing this I derived many suggestions from the essay on The Schools of Charles the Great by James Bass Mullinger, whom in after-years I had the pleasure of numbering among my friends.
Not much of this work was done at Leipzig. In the spring of 1882 I removed to Zurich, where I took quarters in a cottage at Riesbach about a mile out of the town. There I had the advantage of access to two libraries well-equipped for my special purposes. Both were established in disused churches; the town library in the Wasserkirche, close by what was then the uppermost bridge over the Limmat, and the university library in the quire of the Dominican church high up on the Hirschengraben. From these two libraries I enjoyed the privilege of borrowing as many as ten volumes at a time, and I made use of the privilege to the full. The limitations of these libraries were also to my benefit. For example, there was no set of Migne s Patrologia in them, and I had to seek my texts in the Benedictine editions of the fathers, in the Lyons Maxima Biblictheca Patrum, and in the collections of D Achery, Mabillon, Baluze, Fez, and others ; a process which taught me a great deal on the way.
By the time that, working forward from a much earlier period, I had again reached John of Salisbury, the field of my studies was altered by an extraneous cause. It so happened that in the winter which I spent at Leipzig a society was formed with the object of editing Wycliffe s Latin works, and I undertook the charge of the two treatises On Dominion. It was not that I was particularly interested in Wycliffe ; but I had a young man s ambition to print an editio princeps, to bring to light matter hitherto known only from scanty citations ; and the work had a greater attraction for me because it belonged to an early time in Wycliffe s career, before he had come into conflict with authority on questions of theological doctrine. The treatises which I proposed to edit followed in direct sequel the work of other political theorists ; they did not belong to that part of WyclinVs activity in which he stands forth as a pioneer in the discussion of problems which lay apart from those to which my attention had been directed.
Thus after I had completed what I had to say about John of Salisbury I limited myself to the consideration of political theory; and this restric tion prevented me from attempting to include anything which I had contemplated relative to the great period of mature scholasticism. But it was necessary to construct a bridge to join the two parts of my book. A bull of Pope Gregory XI at once directed me to trace the political system of Wycliffe back to Marsiglio of Padua and to William Ockham ; and an exposition of John of Salisbury s views, in the setting of the type of opinion which he represented, was introduced to form a counter- piece to my summary of the opposed doctrine. On my return to England in the summer of 1883 I applied myself to rilling in the gaps in my essays, which needed a larger library than could be found at Zurich, and to completing the last chapters. In the following year I paid a long visit to Vienna in order to examine the Wycliffe manuscripts in the imperial library, and in the course of the autumn my book was published.
The title which I gave to it was Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought in the Departments of Theology and Ecclesiastical Politics. I have now abbreviated it and at the same time expanded its scope. In revising the text I have specially to thank my friend the Rev. F. E. Brightman, D.D., for his great kindness in reading the sheets and suggesting a large number of improvements both in form and matter. In two chapters only, iv and v, have I made extensive alterations. These were required by the new evidence that has been brought to light concerning Bernard of Chartres, whom I have been compelled to distinguish from Bernard Silvestris,[1] and by the discovery of Abailard’s early work de Trinitate in 1891.[2] But changes and corrections of less importance have been made throughout the book, and I have added occasional notes referring to works which have appeared since its first publication. These are distinguished by brackets. I have not, however, given a false appearance of novelty by altering references to suit recent editions, except in a few instances, such as the second edition of Prantl s Geschiclite der Logik im Abendlande, and Mr. Webb s edition of the Policraticus. Nor have I changed the plan of naming the place of publication of books quoted, except when English, French, and German works were published at London, Paris, and Leipzig; and of specifying their size, when it was anything but octavo. References to Bouquet are to the Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France ; those to Pertz indicate the folio series of Scriptores in the Monumenta Germaniae kistorica, and those to Jaffe to the Bibliolheca Rerum German icarum. In citations of manuscripts b denotes the verso of the leaf; but when a manuscript is written in double colums A, B. and c, D denote respectively the two columns of recto and verso.
Oxford,
24 October, 1920.